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Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

scholarship.law.cornell.edu

81–90 of 94 posts

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#81
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t pick sides. Read old document written in specific political tradition. ^ That’s where you jumped the shark. Less biased philosophy might be Camus, or Freire. Camus if you’re feeling cheeky, Freire if you’re feeling academic. Freire describes forced import of culture and solutions to problems by financiers on people far away. It is far more objective look at freedom than the Constitutions goal of agency capture…

ok, so you've criticized the constitution for the acts of unspecified people who later misappropriated it. can we only misappropriate the constitution, or perhaps, some people can take the same document, flawed or not, and derive a reasoned, even egalitarian and/or benevolent, position from it? do you see how that doesn't invalidate the document's principles, or its potential use as a starting point of reasoning?

By saying it can be interpreted correctly or incorrectly and you’re on … the side… of those who interpret it correctly is another violation of your simple philosophy.

You are one of seven billion in an aimless universe with no higher purpose. Your preferred political philosophy is not a universal constant everyone values. Continuing to lean on it does not make your perspective more valid. It just proves changing one’s mind in the face of pushback and new evidence is harder than you cavalierly put it.

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, it absolutely is not, for a democratic republic like the US. the US is designed to have a minimal federal government that doesn't interfere in the individual life and liberty of its residents. this is very unlike governments that came before it and even peer governments now, like the social democracies of europe. our federal government was not meant to be a central planner, but rather simply an interstate and int…

Providing free (at the point of use) health care, and making sure children don't go hungry, and even providing tax benefits to couples who raise children, are all perfectly constitutional policies that don't encroach on civil liberties. All of those policies can be motivated by a state/federal desire to grow the population. In fact, some people believe that the federal government has a legitimate interest in providin…

All of this assumes that same-sex marriage has some effect on rate of reproduction or population growth, when it doesn't.

Notwithstanding the facts that marriage isn't necessary for sexual procreation and that LGBT people can and do procreate, if the primary interest of the state in regards to marriage was to define it in terms of procreation, then the greater concern by far should be heterosexual marriages which don't produce children and rates of divorce. Yet no one is attempting to argue that heterosexual married couples should be required by law to produce a child within, say, two years.

Also, there is a difference between government providing access to services which citizens can choose to avail themselves of, and government legislating reproduction directly. The government doesn't have "an interest in preventing children" in the case of providing access to abortion clinics, rather the interest there is providing access to medical care. The government isn't forcing anyone to have abortions. So the government banning gay marriage in the interest of "producing children," aside from not making any sense as described earlier, isn't a valid countercase to the government providing abortion access.

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, it absolutely is not, for a democratic republic like the US. the US is designed to have a minimal federal government that doesn't interfere in the individual life and liberty of its residents. this is very unlike governments that came before it and even peer governments now, like the social democracies of europe. our federal government was not meant to be a central planner, but rather simply an interstate and int…

Providing free (at the point of use) health care, and making sure children don't go hungry, and even providing tax benefits to couples who raise children, are all perfectly constitutional policies that don't encroach on civil liberties. All of those policies can be motivated by a state/federal desire to grow the population. In fact, some people believe that the federal government has a legitimate interest in providin…

no, healthcare and social programs are statutory, not constitutional. and individual and bodily sovereignty (inalienable rights) trumps any such potential claims the state has on population control in that regard.

those ideas are seeping in from social and religious debates, not legal and civic ones.

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#84
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, so you've criticized the constitution for the acts of unspecified people who later misappropriated it. can we only misappropriate the constitution, or perhaps, some people can take the same document, flawed or not, and derive a reasoned, even egalitarian and/or benevolent, position from it? do you see how that doesn't invalidate the document's principles, or its potential use as a starting point of reasoning?

By saying it can be interpreted correctly or incorrectly and you’re on … the side… of those who interpret it correctly is another violation of your simple philosophy. You are one of seven billion in an aimless universe with no higher purpose. Your preferred political philosophy is not a universal constant everyone values. Continuing to lean on it does not make your perspective more valid. It just proves changing one’…

but i didn't make a qualitative judgment nor take a side. i said you can base a reasonable position on the constitution, as one of many potential starting points.

negative qualitative judgments like yours don't really add to the discussion, because the apparent objective is to tear down rather than build. why not try reasoning to a positive position instead?

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#85
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frederick Douglass very clearly seen slaveholders as enemies and talk about slavery as such. He was not seeking compromise at all, he was seeking abolition full stop. When young, he literally physically fought with his owner. He housed John Brown prior his final raid. He refused participation in Harpers ferry raid, because he seen it as suicidal. Not because he would had issue with taking on arms. He was not as viole…

do you really think that two selected quotes represent the totality of a person's thinking, and how they lived their complete lives? provocative writing is a rhetorical device to bring attention to a grave issue. it's like cursing. it says "i'm serious here!". through experience douglass realized violence doesn't work, something many of us have to learn for ourselves as we grow up. he ultimately realized that to achi…

I read enough about Frederick Dougles, most of it written by himself. Enough to know that yours "espoused exactly the type of cross-racial and cross-ideological dialogue i'm bringing up here" does not describe his stance at all.

He was not merely writing provocatively. He was not provocative in that quote at all. He was trying to radicalize listeners. His distaste toward slaveholders and slavery is clear in his writings, that was his main thing.

> through experience douglass realized violence doesn't work, something many of us have to learn for ourselves as we grow up. he ultimately realized that to achieve abolition, he needed to outreason the slavers, not outgun them

What are you talking about here. He had no issue with Harpers raid or John Browns previous actions. Instead he had respect toward the man. The civil war followed right after the raid - there was not much time to change opinion such fundamentally.

Also, he wanted black men to fight in civil war, he believed it will give them justification for civil rights and confidence.

Frederic Doughles knew violence works, that was his lifetime experience. Slavery was existing purely because of violence and was kept by violence. That is something Dougles wrote about, talked about repeatedly.

And he did not convinced or outreasoned slaveholders either. They lost the war, they were not convinced. They had too much money in slavery for any convincing to be possible. Plus it feels good to be dominant.

He did however pushed and negotiated with Lincoln. However, he was not pacifist in any shape and form. He was critical of radical abolitionists pacifists (and those were not "cross ideology dialog" kind of people either)

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#86
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By saying it can be interpreted correctly or incorrectly and you’re on … the side… of those who interpret it correctly is another violation of your simple philosophy. You are one of seven billion in an aimless universe with no higher purpose. Your preferred political philosophy is not a universal constant everyone values. Continuing to lean on it does not make your perspective more valid. It just proves changing one’…

but i didn't make a qualitative judgment nor take a side. i said you can base a reasonable position on the constitution, as one of many potential starting points. negative qualitative judgments like yours don't really add to the discussion, because the apparent objective is to tear down rather than build. why not try reasoning to a positive position instead?

Because I’ve already walked the path you laid out 20 years ago. I’ve read the letters of the Founders too. That you insist it be used as a basis is a bias I can build things without.

Paraphrasing Jefferson, we should bin the Constitution every 19 years. But Madison felt the future owed the past, so we teach our kids to abide a dead man’s idea of a proper political framework. Paraphrasing Jefferson again; the dead do not rule the living. Paraphrasing Hume then; commit the Constitution to the flames.

From my reference frame you need me to import a specific philosophy when understanding of physical laws are all that’s needed to build.

I’m not being qualitative; there is no theory of science, no quantity of evidence the Constitution is responsible for engineering anything. Plenty of evidence people built together before it existed. From my reference frame you’re demanding more work than necessary to solve human problems.

You’re qualifying my behavior as negative because you’re not getting what you want, but the Constitution does not include a provision to provide you that. shrug

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's have a look at the front page of poal.co, part of your daily reading to get outside the 'standard' filter bubble. OGRellik88 jewspiracy • 10h ago ANN NSFW Graphic How the ADL started. [652x844 - 142KB] (pic8.co) MrPotatoNigger askpoal • 5h ago How do we stop faggots from fucking monkeys? First it was HIV/AIDS and now Monkeypox... and it only affects one group. Clearly faggots fuck monkeys and they need to be st…

>My question is who did you think you were going to convert with this drivel? Why do you think I'm trying to convert anyone? And what do you think I'm trying to convert people to ? You have focused on 4 trees and missed the entire forest.

Because you've said so. You're advocating people make structured effort to gather information from outside their filter bubble (the current thing, used to be called a 'silo'), a reasonable idea.

But the first example you offer for how you go about doing that to differentiate your inputs from HN is a laughably poor knockoff of /pol/. At least /pol/acks make effortposts on a regular basis, there are vigorous contests of ideas, and much that is funny as well as offensive, or that cleverly combines the two. I can think of many other news/political communities and channels that have a right, far right, or outright fascist bias, but offer substantive content of some kind.

What's anyone going to get from this lowest-common-denominator forum? It's like you asserted the need to develop a strong immune system and followed up by eating food off the sidewalk.

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#88
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you really think that two selected quotes represent the totality of a person's thinking, and how they lived their complete lives? provocative writing is a rhetorical device to bring attention to a grave issue. it's like cursing. it says "i'm serious here!". through experience douglass realized violence doesn't work, something many of us have to learn for ourselves as we grow up. he ultimately realized that to achi…

I read enough about Frederick Dougles, most of it written by himself. Enough to know that yours "espoused exactly the type of cross-racial and cross-ideological dialogue i'm bringing up here" does not describe his stance at all. He was not merely writing provocatively. He was not provocative in that quote at all. He was trying to radicalize listeners. His distaste toward slaveholders and slavery is clear in his writi…

you're entitled to your opinions, but it's really hard to believe your scholarship on the man when you've misspelled his name like 15 different ways. i'm willing to have my mind changed on who douglass was because i know i'm not an expert on his life, but your points haven't provided a coherent, convincing argument, and especially do not provide a coherent and convincing counterargument to mine. it doesn't even attempt to address my line of reasoning at all, but rather simply throws out more disconnected and unsubstantiated assertions.

my basic argument was that douglass tried violence, found it didn't achieve his aims, and decided to use his intelligence and empathy instead, and achieved (some of) his aims by winning over those on the margin, not trying to necessarily win over the extremely prejudiced. this happened over a lifetime (some 80ish years), and who someone is is a totality of those years, not some arbitrary subset of them.

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#89
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but i didn't make a qualitative judgment nor take a side. i said you can base a reasonable position on the constitution, as one of many potential starting points. negative qualitative judgments like yours don't really add to the discussion, because the apparent objective is to tear down rather than build. why not try reasoning to a positive position instead?

Because I’ve already walked the path you laid out 20 years ago. I’ve read the letters of the Founders too. That you insist it be used as a basis is a bias I can build things without. Paraphrasing Jefferson, we should bin the Constitution every 19 years. But Madison felt the future owed the past, so we teach our kids to abide a dead man’s idea of a proper political framework. Paraphrasing Jefferson again; the dead do…

let me put it plainly then: you're being evasive because you don't want to be vulnerable. the nihilism you've thrown up is a shield you wield to avoid taking a stance on anything, lest you be attacked for it.

but it doesn't work, see? so might as well stand for something, rather than nothing, if that strategy doesn't make you invulnerable anyway.

Re: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

#90
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I’ve already walked the path you laid out 20 years ago. I’ve read the letters of the Founders too. That you insist it be used as a basis is a bias I can build things without. Paraphrasing Jefferson, we should bin the Constitution every 19 years. But Madison felt the future owed the past, so we teach our kids to abide a dead man’s idea of a proper political framework. Paraphrasing Jefferson again; the dead do…

let me put it plainly then: you're being evasive because you don't want to be vulnerable. the nihilism you've thrown up is a shield you wield to avoid taking a stance on anything, lest you be attacked for it. but it doesn't work, see? so might as well stand for something, rather than nothing, if that strategy doesn't make you invulnerable anyway.

Nihilism to me is using conformity to a philosophy as excuse to defer real effort.

We put American tradition for profit making before the distribution of insulin; oh well if people can’t afford it Your unwavering devotion to a specific form of parliamentary procedure hurts people in need.

From the start I suggest alternatives, you deflect exploring them, and repeat what you showed up with; I don’t think I’m the inflexible mind stuck in one modal. Such a patronizing ass; sorry child, none of those alternatives will do, come let me explain the Bill of Rights again.

I’m plenty vulnerable with friends and family. I’m not about to take the pop psych view of an air gapped stranger to heart; reads like you just pulled that out of a glossary of psych terms and do not understand there is an entire diagnostic criteria required to make such a conclusion. Par for the course on social media.

This conversation is over.

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